Mystery:Who Ghostwrote Obama's Books?

Barack Obama is not an accomplished writer. In fact, he's not much of a writer at all, having never published a single article under his name despite serving as president of a law journal and on the faculty for years at a law school. It took him years and a leave of absence from his job before one of his books was published late under his name.

So the mystery is this: who ghostwrote the books that were published in Obama's name?

A prominent blogger, Steve Sailer, does this comparison between Obama's friend Bill Ayers and Obama's own book:[1]

Here are similar ideas on the unreliability of family anecdotes from the opening of each book expressed in somewhat characteristic language. Ayers writes:

As the journey to my birth was told and retold, stretched and exaggerated, it was as if the young couple had arrived by dogsled having crossed the Alps in a blinding blizzard.

The first half of Ayers' sentence sounds rather like Dreams, but the second half is too Erma Bombeckishly plain-spoken for Obama, whose literary dignity always accompanies him.

In contrast, Obama writes:

... as a child I knew [my father] only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told. They all had their favorites, each one seamless, burnished smooth from repeated use. ... That’s how all the stories went-compact, apocryphal, told in rapid succession in the course of one evening, then packed away for months, sometimes years, in my family’s memory.